Facebook's Internet.org initiative was designed to extend better internet access to developing nations, which it does so via its Free Basics service in 63 countries across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America. The platform's latest app, Express Wi-Fi, aims to connect users to connect to public hotspots offered by the company for a fee.

BlackBerry Messenger was the iMessage of the late 2000s, especially since it was initially exclusive to the company's own hardware. BBM expanded to iOS and Android in 2013, but it has become mostly irrelevant thanks to competitors like WhatsApp and iMessage. BlackBerry is now suing Facebook and its subsidiaries (including WhatsApp and Instagram), alleging that Facebook is violating numerous BBM patents.

Sometimes, the best thing you can do is stay positive. As mothers everywhere are fond of saying, "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." That's a good philosophy, but most of us probably forget to practice it, and Facebook is rolling out a new tool to allow people to hide that sort of content from its site. According to a report published by TechCrunch, Facebook is experimenting with a new "downvote" button, but it's actually just a "report" button.

There have been a few signs already this year that Facebook is maybe feeling the heat. Perhaps younger users are tending towards trendier, more dynamic forms of social media. Perhaps older users are tiring of such platforms altogether and going back to sending hand-written letters. Whatever the reason, Facebook understands that it needs to make some changes to keep its users coming back.

Facebook has released its new Messenger Kids app to the Amazon App Store, making the service available to owners of its Fire line of tablets. So I grabbed one of the Fire 7 tablets we have for our kids and installed the app to see what it was all about, and just how well it works on Amazon's lowest-end hardware.

Particularly for those who were around from the start, usage of Facebook might have waned in recent years. Considering it was originally intended to bring you closer to your friends and family, things are a bit different nowadays. Scroll through your news feed today and you'll likely find a mixture of memes, recipe videos, and adverts (in my case, anyway, but that will depend on what you like/follow), with just a smattering of posts from people you know IRL. The company's mission for 2018: put friends and family at the forefront once again.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined this renewed focus in a post on the site yesterday, where he said that feedback from users was at the heart of upcoming changes to the ranking system.

Amit Fulay served as a Product Manager at Google since 2010, most recently as Head of Product for Real-Time Communications. In other words, he was the head of Allo, Duo, WebRTC, and other projects within the company. Fulay announced on Twitter today that he has left Google, and now works at Facebook.

Many who've used Facebook's main or messaging apps over the years will be acutely aware of how resource and data-hungry they can be. Messenger Lite was a welcome addition when it was released on the Play Store back in October 2016, as it promised to solve both of those issues. The only problem at the time was that it was only launched in emerging markets.

Facebook may have saved many a friendship when it first introduced the "unfollow" feature, wherein a user can tune someone out completely without the drastic step of unfriending them. But there may be times when you just need a break from someone in your network, but you don't necessarily want to ignore them forever. Facebook hopes to address this need with its newly announced feature, Snooze, coming within the next few days.

Snooze will appear as an option from the top-right drop-down menu of someone's post, and when activated, the user will temporarily unfollow the person for 30 days. Over that time, the user will see neither hide nor hair of the snoozed account.

Until now, the default resolution for images sent and received on Facebook Messenger was 2K. That's quite small in terms of megapixels, and anything higher you tried to send someone would be compressed by Messenger before sending. Facebook has just bumped the default image size up to 4K (up to just over 16MP) so you can now send photos of much higher quality to friends and family.